Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.

Sunday, July 05, 2015

Photos from a Korean Conference of Postmodern Medieval Modernists

Here are some photos from my most recent conference presentation. I only go these days if I'm invited, so I don't go to many - though I've gone to more than I anticipated back when I made this decision to go only if invited. Here's the first photo, one of the final photos, actually and obviously:

Professor Bae Kyung Jin is the kind lady who invited me to present a paper at the conference, and we were trying to find the paintings I had located on the internet to use for illustrating the occasional instances of the peach as forbidden fruit. One image I had carefully located had simply vanished! We did without that slide into the fallen world . . . Next comes the man with all the questions, Professor Suh Hong Won:

Professor Suh was kind enough to refer to the paper as a "work in progress" - and it became that over these last two weeks as I read and re-read the paper and made changes . . . subtle changes. By the bye, that lady on the screen is even offering a peach as the forbidden fruit, a painting used in the paper's section on T. S. Eliot's famous peach in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" even though no connection was proven . . . Here's what the brouhaha was all about:

As you see, the paper was co-authored by me and Professor Salwa Khoddam, who couldn't make the trip from Oklahoma, "where the wind comes sweeping across the plains" . . . though I don't think that the sweeping wind was the sole good reason that she couldn't attend (and there's a poem in there somewhere). Finally, the real reason for going to these conferences anyway, as shown in the next photo!

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About Me

I am a professor at Ewha Womans University, where I teach composition, research writing, and cultural issues, including the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history.
My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism.
I also work as one-half of a translating team with my wife, and our most significant translation is Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil, which was funded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested.
I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries.
Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."